Dolby Out To Improve Camera Phone Picture Quality

Barcelona,
Spain - Dolby Labs came to the Mobile World Congress with a technology designed
to improve the image quality of cellphone cameras.

Qualcomm
will incorporate the technology in a range of chips designed for smartphones
and tablets, and a maker of SOCs (system on chips) for digital still cameras
has licensed the technology, Dolby announced.

The
technology, called JPEG-HDR, delivers 26-bit dynamic range (contrast ratio) when
viewed on a PC through photo-sharing websites that Dolby expects will incorporate
the technology. Consumers will also be able to view the pictures in full
dynamic range through a planned Adobe Photoshop plug-in.

Dolby
will also make the technology available to companies with PC-based
photo-viewing programs.

Through
traditional JPEG viewers, the backward-compatible HDR-JPEG photos will show up
as standard JPEGs with 8-bit dynamic range, said Jean-Marc Matteini, Dolby's
digital still images marketing director.

"We
preserve the entire dynamic range" by storing the difference between an 8-bit
photo and a 26-bit photo and converting the difference information into
metadata embedded in the picture, he said. An HDR-JPEG viewer will extract the
metadata to restore full dynamic range to the picture.

"JPEG-HDR
can deliver over 200,000 times wider dynamic range that a conventional JPEG,
preserve details in blacks and highlights while being backwards-compatible with
standard JPEG and similar file sizes," he said.

The
new format "essentially delivers the quality of Radiance HDR, Open EXR and RAW
formats [for professional photographers] without the large file sizes, handling
and compatibility issues," he added.